Why we must create a universal culture of liberty

A short time ago, the town council of El Borge, a tiny town in
the Spanish province of Málaga, held a plebiscite. The citizens
were asked to decide between two alternatives: humanity or
neoliberalism. The result of the poll was 515 votes for humanity
and 4 votes for neoliberalism.

I have not been able to chase those four votes from my thoughts.
In the face of such a dramatic dilemma, those four musketeers did
not hesitate to charge against humanity in the name of the macabre
scarecrow of neoliberalism. Were they four clowns or four sages?
Was this a "Borgean" joke or was it the only sign of sense in the
entire farcical plebiscite?

Not long after, in Chiapas, an International Congress Against
Neoliberal-ism was convened by Subcomandante Marcos, the latest
hero of the frivolous, media-driven politics of the West. Among the
attendees were numerous Hollywood luminaries, a belated Gaullist,
and Danielle Mitterrand, the incessant widow of President François
Mitterrand, who gave her socialist benediction to the event.

Those are quaint episodes, but it would be a grave error to
write them off as the insignificant fluttering of human idiocy. In
truth, they are but the tense and explosive extremes of a vast
political and ideological movement, solidly rooted in sectors of
the left, center, and right, and united in a tenacious distrust of
liberty as the solution to the problems of humanity. They have
built up their fears into a new phantom and called it
"neoliberalism." In the mumbo jumbo of sociologists and political
scientists, it is also known as the "only thought," a scapegoat on
which to hang both present calamities and those of the past.

Brainy professors from the University of Paris, Harvard
University, and the University of Mexico pull their hair out trying
to show that free markets do little more than make the rich richer
and the poor poorer. They tell us that internationalization and
globalization only benefit the giant multinationals, allowing them
to squeeze developing countries to the point of asphyxiation and to
devastate entirely the planetary ecology. So it should not surprise
us that the uninformed citizens of El Borge or Chiapas believe that
the true enemy of mankind -- guilty of all evil, suffering,
poverty, exploitation, discrimination, abuses, and crimes against
human rights committed on five continents against millions of human
beings -- is that terrifying, destructive force known as
neoliberalism. It is not the first time in history that what Karl
Marx called a "fetish" -- an artificial construction, but at the
service of very concrete interests -- acquired consistency and
began to provoke such great disruptions in life, like the genie who
was imprudently catapulted into existence when Aladdin rubbed the
magic lamp.

Liberal caricatures

I consider myself a liberal. I know many people who are
liberals, and many more who are not. But, throughout a career that
is beginning to be a long one, I have not known a single
neoliberal. What does a neoliberal stand for? What is a neoliberal
against? In contrast with Marxism, or the various kinds of fascism,
true liberalism does not constitute a dogma, a closed and
self-sufficient ideology with prefabricated responses to all social
problems. Rather, liberalism is a doctrine that, beyond a
relatively simple and clear combination of basic principles
structured around a defense of political and economic liberty (that
is, of democracy and the free market), welcomes a great variety of
tendencies and hues. What it has not included until now, nor will
it include in the future, is that caricature furnished by its
enemies with the nickname neoliberal.

A "neo" is someone who pretends to be something, someone who is
at the same time inside and outside of something. It is an elusive
hybrid, a straw man set up without ever identifying a specific
value, idea, regime, or doctrine. To say "neoliberal" is the same
as saying "semiliberal" or "pseudoliberal." It is pure nonsense.
One is either in favor of liberty or against it, but one cannot be
semi-in-favor or pseudo-in-favor of liberty, just as one cannot be
"semipregnant," "semiliving," or "semidead." The term has not been
invented to express a conceptual reality, but rather, as a
corrosive weapon of derision. It has been designed to devalue
semantically the doctrine of liberalism. And it is liberalism --
more than any other doctrine -- that symbolizes the extraordinary
advances that liberty has made in the long course of human
civilization.

We should celebrate the achievements of liberalism with joy and
serenity, but without hubris. We must understand that although the
achievements of liberalism are notable, that which remains to be
done is more important still. Moreover, as nothing in human history
is fated or permanent, the progress obtained in these last decades
by the culture of liberty is not irreversible. Unless we know how
to defend it, the culture of liberty can become stagnant and the
free world will lose ground to the forces of authoritarian
collectivism and tribalism. Donning the new masks of nationalism
and religious fanaticism, those forces have replaced communism as
the most battle-hardened adversaries of democracy.

For a liberal, the most important thing to occur in the last
century was the defeat of the great totalitarian offensives against
the culture of liberty. Fascism and communism, each in its moment,
came to threaten the survival of democracy. Now they belong to the
past, to the dark history of violence and unspeakable crimes
against human rights and rationality, and there is no indication
that they will rise from their ashes in the immediate future. Of
course, fascism lingers in the world. At times, ultra-nationalist
and xenophobic parties, much like Jean Marie Le Pen's National
Front in France or Jorg Haider's Liberal Party in Austria, attract
a dangerously high level of electoral support. Also, there exist
anachronistic vestiges of the vast Marxist archipelago, represented
today by the flagging specters of Cuba and North Korea. Even so,
those fascist and communist offshoots do not constitute a serious
alternative -- less still a considerable threat -- to the
democratic option.

Dictatorships still abound, true enough, but in contrast to the
great totalitarian empires, they lack messianic aura and ecumenical
pretensions; many of them, like China, are now trying to combine
the monolithic politics of the single-party state with free-market
economics and private enterprise. In vast regions of Africa and
Asia, above all in Islamic societies, fundamentalist dictatorships
have arisen that have returned those countries to a state of
barbaric primitivism in matters concerning women, education,
information, and basic civic and moral rights. Still, whatever the
horror represented by countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, or Iran,
they are not challenges that the culture of liberty needs to take
seriously: The backwardness of the ideology they profess condemns
those regimes to fall ever farther behind in the race of modernity
-- a swift race, in which the free countries have already taken a
decisive lead.

Battling the apocalyptics

Despite the gloomy geography of persistent dictatorships,
liberals have much to celebrate in these past decades. The culture
of liberty has made overwhelming advances in vast regions of
Central and Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. In
Latin America, for the first time in history, civilian governments
-- born of more or less free elections -- are in power in nearly
every country. (The exceptions are Cuba, an explicit dictatorship,
and until recently Peru, a subtle dictatorship.) Even more notably,
those democracies are now applying -- sometimes with more gritting
of teeth than enthusiasm, sometimes with more clumsiness than skill
-- market policies, or at least, policies that are closer to a free
economy than to the interventionist and nationalizing populism that
traditionally characterized the governments of the continent.

Perhaps the most significant thing about that change in Latin
America is not the quantity, but the quality. Although it is still
common to hear intellectuals who have been thrown out of work by
the collapse of collectivist ideology howling at neoliberalism,
their howls are like those of wolves to the moon. From one end of
Latin America to the other, at least for now, a solid consensus
exists in favor of the democratic system and against dictatorial
regimes and collectivist utopias. Although that consensus is more
restricted with regard to economic policy, Latin American
governments are also bowing to liberal economic doctrine.

Some governments are embarrassed to confess that, and others --
including some real Tartuffes -- cover their bases by spewing out
volleys of rhetoric against neoliberalism. Nevertheless, they have
no other recourse than to privatize businesses, liberalize prices,
open markets, attempt to control inflation, and try to integrate
their economies into international markets. They have come to learn
-- the hard way -- that in today's economic environment, the
country that does not follow those guidelines commits suicide. Or,
in less terrifying terms: That country condemns itself to poverty,
decay, and even disintegration. Many sectors of the Latin American
left have evolved from being bitter enemies of economic liberty to
embracing the wise confession of Václav Havel: "Though my heart may
be left of center, I have always known that the only economic
system that works is a market economy....This is the only natural
economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead
to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature
of life itself."

Those signs of progress are important and give historical
validity to liberal theses. By no means, however, do they justify
complacency, since one of the most refined (and rare) certainties
of liberalism is that historical determinism does not exist.
History has not been written so as to negate any further appeal.
History is the work of men, and just as men can act rightly with
measures that push history in the direction of progress and
civilization, they can also err, and by conviction, apathy, or
cowardice, allow history to slide into anarchy, impoverishment,
obscurantism, and barbarism. The culture of democracy can gain new
ground and consolidate the advances it has achieved. Or, it can
watch its dominions shrink into nothingness, like Balzac's peau
de chagrin. The future depends on us -- on our ideas, our
votes, and the decisions of those we put into power.

For liberals, the war for the progress of liberty in history is,
above all else, an intellectual struggle, a battle of ideas. The
Allies won the war against the Axis, but that military victory did
little more than confirm the superiority of a vision of man and
society that is broad, horizontal, pluralist, tolerant, and
democratic, over a vision that was narrow-minded, truncated,
racist, discriminatory, and vertical. The disintegration of the
Soviet empire before the democratic West validated the arguments of
Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin
concerning the open society and the free economy, and invalidated
the fatal arrogance of ideologues like Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and
Mao Zedong, who were convinced that they had unraveled the
inflexible laws of history and interpreted them correctly with
their proletarian dictatorships and economic centralism. We should
also remember that the West achieved its victory over communism at
a time when its societies were full of inferiority complexes:
Ordinary democracy offered scant "sex appeal" next to the fireworks
of the supposedly classless societies of the communist world.

The present battle is perhaps less arduous for liberals than the
one that our teachers fought. In that battle, central planners,
police states, single-party regimes, and state-controlled economies
had on their side an empire that was armed to the teeth, as well as
a formidable public relations campaign, conducted in the heart of
democracy by a fifth column of intellectuals seduced by socialist
ideas.

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